Dentofacial surgery, also referred to as oral and maxillofacial surgery, is often employed to correct a wide spectrum of diseases, injuries and defects in the head, neck, face, jaws and the hard and soft tissues of the oral and maxillofacial region of humans or other non-human patients. As capabilities of computers and software improve, practitioners of dentofacial surgery increasingly use computer-aided dentofacial imaging tools in order to model dentofacial features of patients, diagnose diseases, injuries, and defects, plan dentofacial surgical procedures and other treatments, and educate patients regarding diagnoses and treatments.
For example, to educate a patient regarding a potential change in physical appearance resulting from dentofacial treatment, a practitioner may desire to present the patient with a “before” image of the patient prior to treatment, an “after” image depicting the patient following treatment, and an animation or “morph” between the before and after images. Traditionally, morphing is accomplished by manually marking key features on a first image, such as the contour of the nose or location of an eye, and manually mark where these same points existed on the second image, creating multiple pairs of line segments. Software would then create an animation whereby the first image would slowly distort to have the features of the second image at the same time that it cross-faded between the two images. However, such manual marking of features may be time-consuming and thus, undesirable.
As another example, to plan and simulate a dentofacial surgery, a practitioner may, with the aid of a computer-aided tool, virtually modify various bones or bone segments of the patient via a user interface of a computer. Such computer-aided planning and simulation may allow a practitioner to simulate effect of various surgical adjustments on a patient, including effects on a patient's aesthetic appearance.